Matter Labs, the company behind zkSync, an Ethereum layer-2 scaling protocol, announced today it received USD $50 million in new funding (in addition to a USD $6M Series A in February of this year). These new funds will be used to expand Matter Labs’ engineering teams and finance business growth.
zkSync uses advanced math to scale Ethereum in a fully trustless manner.
”It is a mission-driven project,” said Alex Gluchowski, Co-Founder and CEO of Matter Labs, “our long-term goal is to make self-sovereign participation in the digital economy — that is, maintaining true control over one’s digital assets — affordable for anyone in the world.”
The Series B financing was led by Andreessen Horowitz and included existing investors Placeholder, Dragonfly, and 1kx. Additionally, this second financing was closed with strategic partners such as Blockchain.com, Crypto.com, Consensys, ByBit, OKEx, Alchemy, Covalent and joined by the founders and leadership of AAVE, Paraswap, Lido, Futureswap, Gnosis, Rarible, Aragon, Liquity, Celer, Connext, Perpetual, Euler, Opium, and a host of others.
“Until recently, we have been focused nearly exclusively on technological innovation. Now it’s time to put a similarly concerted effort into reaching users and developers, which will require scaling our business development and marketing efforts and building out our community and ecosystem,” said Zoé Gadsden, COO of Matter Labs.
A pioneer of Zero-Knowledge Proof technology on Ethereum, Matter Labs launched the first-ever public ZK rollup prototype in early 2019
Fully inheriting Ethereum’s security guarantees, zkSync adopts the ZK rollup architecture — the only blockchain scaling approach that relies on pure cryptography instead of collectively trusted validators, bridges, or watchers. ZK stands for Zero-Knowledge (Proofs), a family of sophisticated protocols for attestation of computational integrity.
Further, zkSync v2 will support EVM-compatible, composable smart contracts. It is the first-ever ZK rollup with a ported Solidity dApp live on its testnet.
“zkSync will enable Ethereum transactions at a much higher rate and lower gas fees than mainnet. The math used by Matter Labs is really quite beautiful, and it is remarkable to see this coming to fruition at a massive scale so soon,” said Dan Boneh, Professor of Computer Science at Stanford.